Tag Archives: voice memo

The MQA master (16/44.1) of “Voice Memo – Songs From Hawaii” is now online with my MQA master download catalog at Bandcamp: http://davidelias-mqa.com

It has a PDF to download with lyrics and notes. There are 30 tracks, all recorded on my iPhone using the stock “voice memo” app. I mastered it at 32/44.1. The download master (16/44.1) was encoded as MQA by MQA Ltd. You can now grab it as MQA online. (Note here, the first printing of the CD is not MQA encoded.)

Thanks again to everyone for listening and for supporting independent artists. If you want one of the printed CDs now (will be online at CDBaby, Amazon, etc. soon) you can let me know. I can mail one to you in the U.S. for $10 through Nov. 30th.

— DE

(from the PDF notes…)

~~~~About My Songwriting~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A way to listen to the way my songs get created. I get asked this often enough. Dave, do you write the words first, or the music, or do you look up random things on Google and get ideas… … … ??

I can tell you there is no research in my songwriting. No Google, no newspapers, no references. Not even an idea of what I am going to write about 99.99% of the time. I am a tune player and creator on guitar. That’s usually what I do when I pick up the guitar, play something new whatever comes out. It comes through me sitting there and I don’t think about it much except trying to hear what it’s saying. 99% of the time I play and play and play for awhile then forget it all.

But sometimes the tune is catchy to me and I work on it and keep trying to get it right and eventually it sounds like it has the right shape and notes and well, tune.

So I might start singing along with it at some point during that sitting and see if there’s a singing part to go with the guitar part. No real words but then usually there are real words coming out of me, I didn’t plan them.

So there’s the idea for the song and I just write down the words as I come upon them and turn them into the melody and the song. That’s how I remember the song – that and then I often turn on Voice Memo on the iPhone to record it at that point. Like I just discovered something I don’t want to forget. Which is what I did.

Voice memo….

Sometimes the tunes on guitar don’t have any words. They are enough they way they are. Or words could come later. Or words I’d written down (poetry ok) another time can be randomly matched to a tune. That happens too.

So tune first, words next, song maybe. Or tune first, no words, song maybe. Or tune not quite there, no song, maybe later. Or words sitting on a page to tune just written or written and remembered, song maybe. See what I mean? No plan :)

Just trying to get it right…

Voice memos can help. Decided to try to share some of those in the honest fashion they were created sitting at home just playing for me.